(Boy and man are profoundly mixed up in this case. It isn’t just that middle-aged George had a taste for kiddie cartoon lunch boxes, or that his fetish might have reproduced a childhood event, or that the child John Katehis’s taste ran to swords and knives, or that he could admonish his elder by e-mail, “you’ve been a naughty boy”—father and son themselves seem reversed.)
At five-eleven, taller than either of his parents, bigger, handsomer, more poised, more adult-seeming, John was led to the defense table rear-handcuffed before every pretrial hearing in the spring and summer of 2010. Judge Neil Jon Firetog held these cattle calls on Fridays. Family members and lawyers crowded a fourth-floor courtroom as the judge summarily dispatched motions and scheduling matters for a slew of defendants, some of whom appeared by video-link from Riker’s Island. The scene could get hectic as a sergeant expelled those who couldn’t find seats; Firetog mocked a lawyer’s Vivaldi-playing cell phone (“Either turn that off or change the ring tone”); a Chinese translator scrambled to a phone line open to the video booth at Riker’s; and irrelevant but fascinating conversations were whispered nearly at one’s ear: “My baby was shot in the back eight times.” “Mm, that hurts.” “They know it was a silver Audi, but they don’t have a plate or a gun or a shooter.”
John was often brought out late in the session when the crowd had thinned. Spiro and Beth and whoever had come with them might move to get a better spot for the brief moment when John would turn his head and hunt for them. He scanned others in the crowd as well, and sometimes, like a teenager—like most of the defendants—he’d play it tough.
From a distance his brown eyes look pure black. The bridge of his nose is broad, which gives him the tawny-skinned air of a lion in repose. A dent convinced anonymous “experts” online that his nose had been broken once. His long chin juts. He looks more like his mother than his nebbishy father, but outshines them both by far.
Brisk and unceremonious, anything but a showboater, Judge Firetog appeared to find the slick defense attorney, Jeffrey T. Schwartz, irritating from the start. A major flare-up occurred during a hearing on April 23. Schwartz appealed to have Weber’s computer hard drive released. The computer likely did contain records of his exchanges with hustlers and maybe pornography, but Weber’s reputation and past behavior really weren’t at issue in this case (though of course they were). Firetog brusquely denied Schwartz’s request because it had no relevance to the defense the lawyer was planning. “Why do you really want this information?”
Schwartz, wearing an overly white, overly even, but somehow confrontational smile, along with flashy cuff links, watch, and a quadruple-pointed handkerchief in the breast pocket of his chalk-stripe suit, replied, “Prosecution aims to prove Katehis came over to rob or attack Weber, but if we can establish Weber had a pattern of inviting over underage boys for sex . . .”
Firetog scooted forward. Shaking his robed forearm back and forth, he demanded, “But what is your defense?”
“It appears Weber invited our client, an underage boy, over—”
“It doesn’t work that way. What is your defense?”
“It’s been established that physical force is allowable in the case of an unwanted sexual assault.”
“So this will be self-defense?” An outright argument of self-defense would be tough given the evidence.
“No,” Schwartz conceded, but he continued arguing.
Firetog cut him off and explained with a great sigh that the computer information would be under seal and available as a possible appellate issue.
Still, Schwartz argued. He complained that the date Firetog set for the trial was too soon.
* * *
The trial began on October 18. Firetog’s annoyance only increased. Schwartz was combative and scattershot before jury selection. He claimed he hadn’t had enough time to prepare; police officers had failed to determine reasonable cause; Katehis was the victim of an adult predator; evidence of some kind of illegal sexual contact simply had to be introduced.
Schwartz kept at it until Firetog shouted him down wearily, “You can’t argue facts that are not in the record!” When Schwartz still wouldn’t back down, the judge threatened him with contempt of court if anything like this happened in front of a jury. The lawyer would be fined $2,500 per offense.
The following day saw a long and contentious discussion at the bench. The main points of the bench conference were later repeated for the record: defense felt the warnings of contempt of court, the mention of fines, and the number of objections sustained all indicated that the judge was unduly hostile. Schwartz felt his ability to defend his client was compromised. In conference he’d asked the judge to recuse himself. Sighing, yet elaborately conciliatory, Firetog tried to brush aside the mess.
Schwartz stood up. “I’ve never had an experience in my life where I’ve been threatened with contempt.” He said he was an ex-prosecutor and understood trials from both sides, but in this case his guiding light was the best interests of his client. He claimed the judge was “chilling” their defense. “You have made me feel like a marked target. You have frightened and terrified my client, a sixteen-year-old boy, and his family.” He claimed that John, Beth, and Spiro had all lost confidence in the judge’s fairness.
For the record, Schwartz went on, he wanted to tell a story. “You have overpersonalized this,” he said. “We’ve had an experience in the past.”
Schwartz recounted that he’d been assigned a prominent case a year or so earlier. “Though my client wanted me,” another lawyer “bad-mouthed” him, and the judge on the case shut Schwartz out. Schwartz said he’d filed a grievance against the judge in question even though “Your Honor” recommended against it. Firetog had told him to let it go. “You offered to give me another high-profile case.” (Schwartz gravitates to prominent cases; he was representing John Katehis pro bono but getting some press attention for his efforts.)
Judge Firetog listened to all this and wondered aloud how any of it could have prejudiced him against Schwartz. They argued a bit more, but Firetog soon announced, “The motion for recusal is denied.”
Schwartz then asked if he could go at once to the current chief administrative judge to have a new judge assigned to the case. “I can’t operate with a target on my chest. I feel muzzled.” He said he was so uncomfortable that he’d asked an ethics attorney to sit in on the proceedings.
Nonetheless, the trial continued. Schwartz was often slapped down with “asked and answered” and “objection sustained” even in the presence of the jury. (Once, during ADA Fliedner’s testimony, the jury was ordered to file out for a moment, and Firetog gave Schwartz a quick browbeating.)
The defense didn’t have much going for them, but the well-prepared slickness of the prosecution witnesses, police witnesses especially, may have been causing a few juror doubts about whether proper procedure had been followed during the investigation—an idea Schwartz was, of course, trying to foster. Spiro clearly believed that information about the Middletown capture was being held back. On the stand, Normile and Fliedner smoothly described Spiro as invariably cooperative. It must have hurt. Spiro was beside himself, red-faced, glaring, tearful, as he listened to them. They were making it sound like he’d betrayed his son. “Did you notice they wouldn’t look at me?” he later asked me with a flash of uncomprehending rage.
Outside the courtroom, Spiro said he couldn’t wait to get on the stand to tell his side of the story. But he never got the chance. The defense presented no case, perfectly normal in a situation like this where you’re better off not opening your side to awkward questioning. To me, Spiro claimed the police had burst into his place, threatened to shove a cell phone down his throat if he didn’t give them what they wanted, and then drove him up to Middletown in handcuffs. He skipped over the telephone call actually setting his son up for capture. But he clearly believed he and John had been wronged.
Tension was rising. Spiro hissed about Itsi Atkins. “I don’t know what Beth thinks she
’s doing with him. He’s a fucking producer. If he tries to sit in my place again I’m going to fucking kick the shit out of him.” With sublime disgust, he complained that a Greek reporter had even mistaken the much older Itsi for him, Spiridon, the father.
In the men’s room, where the plumbing made the constant unnerving sound of a patient on a respirator, Itsi suavely accosted me after seeing me talk to Spiro. “You might want to be careful who you talk to . . . I’m just saying. There are two sides in this, and they don’t always see eye to eye. Just so you know, Beth and I are in control of the real information. And we have John’s full support and approval.”
Spiro, meanwhile, had seen me give Beth an e-mail and telephone number. He complained, “When I saw you do that, I thought, Oh shit, he’s just gonna get her side of things. Did you see that huge fight we had yesterday? No? Good.”
* * *
No quick verdict came the day the jury was sent to confer. Schwartz bustled and grinned nervously. The slender, long-haired assistant district attorney, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, sat lonelier than ever at the prosecution table. Every so often her skinny elbows rose and she’d grasp the chair’s armrests as if about to rise with an objection. She merely shifted, but with odd precision. (She was, incidentally, enormously pregnant with a little girl. In the context of her controlled and graphic descriptions of the murder, the pregnancy was a bit disconcerting.)
Before lunch the jury sent out notes requesting to review testimony. Later, a note came out saying they were having trouble reaching a verdict. They weren’t sure what constituted reasonable doubt. The judge had them file back into the courtroom and recited his definition for them.
At 4:48 the jury sent out a note saying they still hadn’t come to a unanimous verdict. Firetog highlighted their use of the words “at this point.” The next day the jurors watched John’s video confession again. They had more testimony read back. They asked about reasonable doubt yet again. They said they were still struggling to reach a verdict. Eventually, the judge called them out (John as well) and read what’s called the Allen charge—basically, Go back in there and really try! Experienced reporters said the Allen charge rarely worked and was usually a prelude to a mistrial.
The final day was veiled in tedium. Around noon the press filled the front row reserved for them. I could overhear whispers from a bench conference. “You want to try it again real soon?” “November 3?”
John was brought out at twelve twenty. Judge Firetog announced that the jury had sent out another note saying they were deadlocked, and he declared a mistrial. After that came a flurry of administrative announcements. As retained but unpaid counsel, Schwartz said he might not be able to handle the retrial. John was left alone at the defense table while his lawyer and a colleague went to fetch boxes of trial material from a back room.
Firetog: “So they’ll go to the 18B panel for a new public defender. Who’s up? Maybe Herbert Moser. Another ADA may be necessary as well, due to . . .” He nodded toward the pregnant ADA. November 3 was announced as the date for reassignment.
“Oh, and can we revisit bail?” Schwartz asked, returning with his boxes.
“Maybe,” the judge said. “Let’s see what the split was. If they want to tell us the split.”
The jury was led in and the mistrial was announced. Several jurors tried to communicate dissent by stiffly shaking their heads. The judge thanked them all and dismissed them, saying, with a wintry smile, that he’d see them all again in eight years. John couldn’t resist a grin as the jurors filed out. He looked surprised, though Schwartz had boasted to reporters back when the first jury note came out, “We won!”
It was agreed the judge would speak to the jury first. After that the lawyers could debrief them. Then reporters would be able to question willing ex-jurors.
But after a few moments Judge Firetog hurried back into the courtroom, his black robe flying. It was strange to see him off the elevated bench, on a level with the lawyers and other mortals. He rested a hand on the court reporter’s desk. He was wearing a somewhat sheepish but giddy expression. He slicked his black hair. “Something very strange just happened. The minute I went in there the jury told me, ‘If we could have just an hour longer we could reach a verdict.’”
Schwartz jumped up and started to argue coercion. “They’ve been dismissed!”
“I didn’t say a word to them,” Firetog countered, then climbed onto the bench.
Schwartz was outraged: “This is unconscionable!”
The reporters scribbled in their steno pads.
Asked to respond to Schwartz, even Nicolazzi seemed at a loss. “Well, this is a very unusual situation, but . . .” It was obvious to everyone which direction the verdict had to be leaning.
Firetog hustled things along: “Let’s bring out the defendant.” John was brought back in looking deeply confused and, frankly, scared. As soon as he was uncuffed and the court officers had taken their usual seats behind him, Schwartz stood and argued for all he was worth.
The judge was adamant about pushing ahead. It was a rare opportunity, and it was worth trying to get a verdict from this jury.
“There is no jury. The jury’s been dismissed.”
Firetog announced, “The mistrial is vacated.”
Schwartz kept arguing, until another note was passed to the judge, who quieted the defense lawyer with a wave of his hand. He said it now looked like all arguments were moot, because the jury was asking to speak to the lawyers. Firetog said this with an air of deflation, as if he thought he’d witnessed something magical—magical justice—only to realize at the last moment it was a clever fraud. The world worked in the same old messy and unjust way. The mistrial was reinstated.
“No backsies this time, judge?” Schwartz demanded.
It turned out the jury had taken three votes. The first was nine-to-three to convict. Three women voted to acquit. (Because he was young, cute? No, said juror seven, a man. Was it about the sex thing? Tough at first, but we got over it.) The second poll was ten-to-two. The final tally, eleven-to-one. The one woman held out, it was revealed, because she couldn’t resolve a doubt about John’s intent.
VI. Time
After almost a year, during a stretch of heartbreakingly golden late-fall weather in November 2011, John Katehis was tried again in Brooklyn Supreme Court. He was eighteen now and had been moved from the Robert N. Davoren Complex (detained male adolescents) to the Otis Bantum Correctional Center (detained male adults), both on Riker’s Island. An eleventh grader when he went in, he’d passed his GED while imprisoned (with very high scores, Spiro insisted to me proudly). There’d also been a serious fight and a stretch in isolation.
On court days John would pull his pink shirt or his brown-striped one from under his cell mattress where he kept them “pressed.” He’d wear one of these and a tan striped tie. By the end they were looking quite wrinkled. A beat-up white bus with grated windows swept him into the underground garage of the court building. The old cast of characters had assembled, along with a canny new defense lawyer, Jay Cohen, who hammered away at the unsavory sex details. But nearly a year had passed, and things were inevitably different the second time around. Judge Firetog conducted the trial with a slight air of haste. Prosecution seemed almost rote at first. Beth was absent sometimes, notably when the lawyers made summations and the day we waited for a verdict. One morning after stiffly scanning the crowd, John muttered almost inaudibly to himself, “Where is she?”
Spiro was obviously exhausted. (He was out of work and complained that he didn’t have enough money for lunch one day.) I once noticed him asleep in his oversized pinstriped suit on a bench outside the courtroom. Later he fell asleep in the courtroom itself as a series of gruesome photographs was introduced into evidence—a bad moment for John. John turned to see his father’s chin slumped on his chest and made a sour expression, undoubtedly feeling terribly alone.
Along with the sense of hurry came a sort of callused energy. Much more horrible photographs w
ere introduced this time. The language was more graphic. Defense was more aggressive about disparaging George Weber’s behavior. We even saw a shocking picture of the bruised (bitten?) penis. As the actual murder receded into the past, memory seemed to grow colder, more brutal. “I just need five more minutes, judge,” Nicolazzi snapped at Firetog before her summation. Then she delivered her speech with stiff passion.
Though this time they were given the option of a second, lesser charge—manslaughter—the jury was slow again. Perhaps they couldn’t forgive Weber’s strange sexuality. Or they couldn’t bear throwing a young man’s life away. You could see the strain on jurors’ ashen faces and imagine their weariness. They chose murder in the second degree, finally, the more serious charge (and the highest possible in New York, where first degree murder has to involve “special circumstances,” like a police officer victim, multiple murders, or torture).
They’d decided John meant to kill. Until the foreman spoke the atmosphere had been heavy. Now Spiro looked faint, cameras chittered like squirrels, glances collided and retreated in the courtroom’s suddenly frictionless air. John’s mild self-confident expression froze. Poked on the shoulder by a court officer, he turned to give his father a big those-are-the-breaks smile and a shrug. A tough guy.
9
DESTRUCTION
It feels almost apocalyptic to end with a killing so pure. A relative speaking for Weber’s family at the sentencing told John Katehis that the only motive he could imagine was that “you killed him because you could.” He said the family believed it would have been somebody else if not Weber. Katehis’s father sobbed, entirely alone, until his ex-wife hurried in halfway through the sentencing, her hair freshly blond and ironed flat. (Afterward I saw her—tiny, pert, solitary—on a subway platform; we pretended not to know one another and boarded a train several cars apart.)
American Honor Killings Page 21